Climate change is often described as the greatest
environmental crisis faced by the world. So what is the significance of the unfolding
global financial crisis for the "climate crisis"? Might it lead to a retreat from
concern, a resurgent interventionism or a reflection on society's deeper
dilemmas?

Mike Hulme is professor in the school of environmental
sciences at the University of East Anglia.
His next book is Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge University
Press, February 2009). His website is here

"Climate change" involves far more than a
measured description of evolving trends in regional or global weather
statistics or an uncomplicated account of the changing biogeochemical functions
of the Earth system. How we talk about climate change - our discourse - is
increasingly shaping our perception and interpretation of the changing physical
realities that science is battling to reveal to us. At that same time,
discourse is always embedded in evolving cultural, political and ethical
movements and moods. Not only is our climate unstable, but how we talk about
our climate is also unstable.

Understanding climate change - and the meaning
we attach to the idea - is therefore always historically contingent. A sequence
of four influential themes that have emerged over the last four decades
illustrates the point. The idea of anthropogenic global climate change first
became a possibility following the emergence of the 1960s environmental
movement; the phenomenon became fully globalised during the triumph of economic
globalism during the 1980s and 1990s; climate change then became part of new
security discourses which emerged after 9/11; while following the Stern report on the economics of climate change
in 2006, climate change has been viewed by some as merely a consequence of
market failure.

The onset of the financial crisis and a
gathering worldwide recession, signalled by the banking collapses and emergency
bailouts of September-October 2008 - make it plausible to anticipate that this
period too will generate its own characteristic frame of reference. So how will
this latest manifestation of economic globalism change the way we think, talk
and act about climate change? What may this new global turn eventually do to
climate - both materially (by modifying the flows of carbon-dioxide through the
planet) and culturally (by modifying the rhetoric and language of climate
change)?

The three pointers

Climate change is a powerful symbol of the
current zeitgeist. It is a hybrid phenomenon that reveals and is revealed by a
number of important political, economic, intellectual and psychological
dualisms: global-local, north-south, material-cultural, fear-hope,
control-vulnerability. As we vacillate between these poles of thought and
action, so too does our talk of climate change and with it our understanding of
the phenomenon and what it means to us. Climate change becomes a continually
mutating hybrid entity in which scientific narratives are unavoidably entangled
with wider social discourses (see "Climate change: from issue to magnifier", 19 October 2008).

There are many directions in which this hybrid
entity of climate change may evolve in the months and years ahead, in parallel
with persisting economic problems and accompanying social dislocation. Just as
the physical climate- system responds both to slow-changing natural rhythms and
also to more rapid human-induced perturbations, so will those human artefacts
we use to make sense of climate change - language, metaphors, policies, beliefs
- respond both rapidly and slowly to the new financial and economic mood. I
suggest these social responses may fall into one of three meta-categories:

* a retreat from concern about climate change

* a resurgent support for state policies on
climate change

* a deeper reflection about the human drivers
of climate change.

The warm echo

The first response is seen in the instinctive
reaction of some commentators to questions about the significance of the
financial crisis for climate change: that the bursting of the credit-bubble
will be mirrored in the bursting of the climate-change bubble. The adherents of
this view will mobilise historical precedent (such as the collapse of surging
environmental populism in Europe following the 1991 recession) to argue that
the new recession will reveal the shallowness of the commitments of political
leaders to effecting far-reaching reductions in carbon emissions.

The gradual
dilution of the European Union's 2020 carbon-reduction target is reflected in the opposition of east-central European states to the auctioning of
emissions-permits, and in the further transfer from Europe of "real" physical
emissions-reductions to the "purchased" emissions-reductions of the global
south; the outcome might support the contention that in this region at least, economic uncertainty is likely to be followed by environmental retreat.

The second response, and a counter-argument to
the above, is that the financial crisis will provide just the confidence-boost
that is needed for neo-Keynesian interventionistpolicies on climate change. If
banks can be brought under state control through massive injection of borrowed
funds, then surely new waves of state investment targeted at low-carbon energy
supply and energy-efficiency technologies can be secured. This was the basic
argument outlined in the "green new deal", launched in July 2008 by the new
economics foundation before the financial crisis fully matured; it is a case
repeated by other voices such as Elliot Morley, president of
GLOBE International (see his speech in Washington on 11 October 2008 to the International Commission on Climate and Energy Security).

This argument of "crisis-as-opportunity" also
resonates with the influential thinker Anthony Giddens's call for the old
"enabling state" to evolve into the new "ensuring state" (see "The politics of climate change", Policy Network, 8
September 2008). This would require certain collectively-defined
emissions-outcomes to be ensured through appropriate regulatory frameworks. To
achieve the putative goals of climate policy under such a dispensation would
call for, if not quite the discredited heavy-handed state collectivism of
earlier ideologies, then a new "green" authoritarianism within western liberal
democracies. In Britain for example, it is hard to see how else the
climate-change minister Ed Miliband's adoption of a minimum 80% reduction in
carbon-emissions by 2050 will be secured. Voluntarism in climate change, this
argument would suggest, may soon seem as outdated an axiom as self-regulation
of capital markets now appears.

These two reactions to the financial crisis - a
retreat from concern and a resurgence of regulation - appear diametrically
opposed. Yet each reveals a conservative understanding of the fundamental
conundrum which underlies climate change. Neither attempts or engages with any
deep diagnosis of the climate-change phenomenon. A third response, less
articulated at present than the other two but already visible, may by
undertaking this task come to offer a new set of directions: whereby the
financial crisis could move our discourse about climate change towards wider
challenges to our values, our lifestyles and our (implicit and explicit)
judgments about human well-being.

These challenges may range from questioning
the ethics underlying institutional forms and practices to questioning the
values and aspirations of individual citizens. Jonathon Porritt, for example,
calls for a recognition of the parallels between financial and ecological debt
(see Jonathon Porritt, "Zero hour for a new capitalism", Green Futures, October 2008);
and this is itself an upstream economic version of the argument already
articulated in WWFs report Weathercocks
and Signposts(April 2008)

The latter suggests that no substantial
progress on climate-change goals will be secured without confronting the
prevailing "extrinsic" values (material goods, financial success, image) by
which society largely operates, and replacing them with "intrinsic" values
(personal growth, emotional intimacy, community involvement). This implies no
less than a wholesale reframing and redirecting of human development. If we apply the
scenario categories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC's) special report on emissions scenarios, the WWF report advocates a future that looks and feels more like the "local stewardship" (B2) scenario than the "global
affluence" (A1) world. Such a project of social restructuring resonates too
with the "low-energy cosmopolitanism" postulated by Andrew Dobson and David
Hayes (see "A politics of crisis: low-energy
cosmopolitanism", 22 October
2008).

The inner cost

The financial crisis that has shaken the world
in autumn 2008, and the recession trailing in its wake, will at the very least
make us realise that an adequate reading of climate change is about very much
more than "getting the science right" or deploying clever Earth-systems models
that offer predictions of approaching climate tipping-points. The future course
of climate change - understood as a hybrid physical-cultural phenomenon in
which science and our social discourse are enduringly entangled - has many more
dimensions than those that can be represented numerically in a model.

The financial crisis, seen in an optimistic
light, may yet do more than this. It may help us see that climate change isn't
the greatest demon we humans have to confront; rather, our demons reside in the
values we live by. If it causes us to expose the impossible arithmetic of more-people-plus-greater-material-consumption-plus-higher-levels-of-debt
equals-an-improving-quality-of-life, then it may do more for climate change
than any number of economic or political interventions.

There is a new form of climatic determinism on
the rise and the allure of this thinking for the naïve or for the mischievous
is dangerous. It finds its expression in some of the balder claims made about
the future impacts of climate change: 180 million people in Africa to die from
hunger; 40% of known species to be wiped out; 20% of global GDP to be lost. But
such determinism is perhaps at its most insidious when found in the new discourse
about climate (in)security. Here are only five recent examples, among an
increasing number:

The headline in
the Independent newspaper on 13
October 2007 made it quite clear what the issue was: "He's won
an Oscar. He's won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, can he win the Presidency?" Can
Al Gore accomplish what no one has done before and secure this unique
triumvirate of accolades and accomplishments?

The award of the
2007 Nobel peace
prize jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and
the former vice-president of the United States has been applauded
the world over. "It recognises climate change as a security issue", "... it
emphasises the role of science in problem-solving", "... it rewards a charismatic
communicator who has put climate change centre-stage". To the contrary, I found
the rationale for this award bizarre. It was bizarre for Alfred Nobel's peace
prize to be thus awarded - I fail to see where peace has broken out as a result
of climate-science papers or Al Gore presentations. And it was bizarre to join
together the enterprise of a huge international scientific assessment with a
one-man publicity campaign aimed at subverting the power of the White House.
The Independent newspaper, for all
its populist ballyhoo, clearly saw what it was about. Why was the Nobel committee taken in?